The Shoah within European identity

In the Epilogue of Postwar, titled: From the House ofthe Dead: An essay on Modern European memory, Tony Judt concludes that: ‘those who would become full Europeans in the dawn of the twenty-first century must first assume a new and far more oppressive heritage. Today the pertinent European reference is not baptism. It is extermination. Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket.’ Claus Leggewie, in his article ‘Seven circles of European memory’, is searching for a pan-European narrative that includes both East and West in a common European story. In his narrative the Shoah plays an important role as ‘a negative founding myth’. In my presentation I would like to elaborate on the question of whether there actually is a collective European memory about the Shoah. Can the Shoah function as an ‘European entry ticket’ or does it actually have more of a desintegrating function? Contemporary developments and debates in Hungary and Poland will underline the importance of this discussion and at the same time illuminate the debat